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<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <blockquote><p>
<b>All Over but the Shoutin'</b><br />
By Rick Bragg. Vintage Books, 329 pages, $14.00<br /><br /><b>Ava's Man</b><br />
By Rick Bragg. Random House, 272 pages, $13.00<br /><br /><b>An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood</b><br />
By Jimmy Carter. Touchstone Books, 288 pages, $15.00
</p></blockquote>
<p>
<span class="dropcap">I</span> am not a southerner, though I was raised like one. I grew up in a small suburb in the foothills near Los Angeles, where I was born, far from the thick air and dark soil of northeast and south central Texas, where my parents were born and raised. Some of my earliest, foggiest memories are of biscuits and gravy on Saturday mornings and hellfire sermons on Sundays. But there is one morning I'll never forget, a summer morning in California in 1989, when I was 21 years old. I was home from my New England liberal-arts college, sitting at the kitchen table with my father -- a man born in 1932, the fifth of six children, whose parents got through the Depression as sharecroppers and day laborers in Paris, Texas. The conversation turned to a book I'd just read on the South, and I asked my father, in all seriousness and with a kind of anthropological detachment, whether his family had been "poor white trash." </p>
<p>
I'd never known my father's parents, and I barely knew my uncles, aunts and cousins. In fact, I had no idea what I was asking. But my father, though clearly startled, simply looked at me and spoke four words that explained more about the experience of his family and people like them than any book I ever read at Harvard.</p>
<p>
"Not <i>trash</i>," he said, "but poor."</p>
<p>
From that moment, as I went on to study the history, politics and culture of the South, I became sensitive to the time-honored image of the region's poor whites as cultural pariahs -- stereotyped and caricatured as degenerate, violent and instinctively racist in a way that has attached not just a social but a moral stigma to their poverty. One thing I discovered along the way was that this widely accepted prejudice is closely linked to a well-documented tendency among more affluent and "respectable" white southerners to blame the region's worst vices -- its history of violence and racism, its ignorance of and hostility toward outsiders -- on the lower classes, even when it was obvious that the "better" whites were thoroughly complicit in a racial apartheid enforced by terror and one-party white-supremacist politics. On the subject of lynching (the embodiment of that terror), an educated southerner such as W.J. Cash was, as late as 1941, able to write the following in <i>The Mind of the South</i>: </p>
<blockquote><p>
Contrary to widespread popular belief, which the South itself has fostered, the persistence of lynching in the region down to the present has not been due simply and wholly to the white-trash classes. ... The common whites have usually done the actual execution, of course, though even that is not an invariable rule (I have myself known university-bred men who confessed proudly to having helped roast a Negro). But they kept on doing it, in the last analysis, only because their betters either consented quietly or, more often, definitely approved.
</p></blockquote>
<p>
The kind of condescension and moral scapegoating Cash described can still be seen today, even in places one would least expect -- such as in a recent memoir by a liberal former president of the United States. All too rare today, however, are honest attempts (outside of graduate-school seminars) to explore and understand the experience of poor, white southerners without making excuses for the real racism that exists, and without sentimentalizing poverty. Lord knows I could have used some instruction in this regard before I opened my mouth that morning in California. Instead, my lesson came from the look on my father's face and his quick, reflexive rejection of the epithet I'd so blindly uttered. </p>
<p>
<span class="dropcap">A</span>nyone who wants to understand race and class in the modern South from the perspective of poor and working-class whites would do well to read two books by the journalist Rick Bragg. Bragg knows what poverty and the fear of poverty do to people at the margins where race and class intersect in their most combustible interactions. Raised dirt poor in rural Alabama, Bragg escaped by way of jobs at local and regional newspapers, and went on to become a national correspondent for <i>The New York Times</i>, where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for feature writing. Bragg's 1997 memoir, <i>All Over but the Shoutin'</i>, and his follow-up, <i>Ava's Man</i>, are what he's given back to the people he loves and to whom he feels indebted. </p>
<p>
Bragg's first memory, as he tells us in <i>All Over but the Shoutin'</i>, is of being pulled along behind his mother on a cotton sack in northeast Alabama sometime around 1962, part of the last generation of southerners to experience day labor in the cotton fields. The figure of the cotton picker, thanks to Depression-era photographers and Hollywood screenwriters, has become by now a kind of archetypal image of the rural South, verging on the clichés of coffee-table Americana. But Bragg, with his characteristic directness, cuts straight to the less picturesque facts. "No matter how poor or desperate you were," recalls Bragg -- whose mother raised three boys by herself, on welfare and the kindness of kin and strangers -- "back then, there had always been the field. It did not matter that most white people considered it 'nigger work.' It was our work."</p>
<p>
<i>Ava's Man</i>, which appeared last year, is a fiercely proud and loving portrait of Bragg's maternal grandfather, Charlie Bundrum -- "a carpenter, roofer, whiskey maker, sawmill hand, well digger, hunter, poacher, and river man." A man, Bragg tells us, "who built dozens of pretty houses for Depression-era wages and never managed to build one for the people he loved the most, who could not read but always asked [his wife] Ava to read him the newspaper so he would not be ignorant." A man who was buried in a blue suit, but whose hands -- "rough and scarred and callused, his nails thick and cracked" -- gave him away. "A man," writes Bragg, "that history would otherwise have ignored, as it would have ignored my mother and people like her, the working people of the Deep South." That man, we learn, spent two weeks in a Birmingham jail for "vagrancy" in 1953 because Eugene "Bull" Connor, the city's infamous police commissioner, "didn't want any white trash on his streets."</p>
<p>
If Bragg sounds like a writer with a healthy allotment of class consciousness, he's also one who doesn't flinch from the unflattering realities of racism, poverty and politics as they violently intermingled in the segregated South of his childhood. In <i>All Over but the Shoutin'</i>, he remembers a young George Wallace in 1964, "in a baggy suit and slicked-down hair," as he "talked hot and mean about the colored," assuring Bragg's family and people like them that they were "better than the nigras." ("We had not known we were better than anybody," Bragg says, allowing a rare hint of self-pity to creep into his voice.) And yet, Bragg tells us, "even as the words of George Wallace rang through my Alabama," there came a knock on his mother's door one day, and a little boy "the color of bourbon, one of the children who lived down the road," offered food to Bragg's destitute family. "He said his momma had some corn left over and please, ma'am, would we like it. ... They must have heard how our daddy ran off. They knew. They were poor, very poor ... but for a window in time they had more than us." </p>
<p>
As tempting as it might be to draw a comforting picture of racial redemption from this anecdote of the black family's charity, Bragg won't yield to it. "I would like to say that we came together, after the little boy brought us that food, that we learned about and from each other, but that would be a lie. It was rural Alabama in 1965." The most he will permit himself to say is that he and his brothers no longer threw rocks at their black neighbors.</p>
<p>
Bragg's honesty, his refusal to let himself or others in his condition off the hook, is his most impressive quality as a writer, and ultimately far more important than the details of his own life's trajectory. Bragg fills in the landscape with undeniably <i>human</i> beings without succumbing to the impulse to explain away, much less make excuses for, the brutal fact of the racism that permeated his environment. His childhood, he writes, "was a time when beatings were common, when it was routine, out of pure meanness, to take a young black man for a ride and leave him cut, broken or worse on the side of some pulpwood road. For sport. For fun. This was a time when townspeople in nearby Anniston clubbed ... and burned the buses of the Freedom Riders. This was a time of horrors ... ." But Bragg doesn't leave it at that. He completes the picture of his world -- a world that has, for too many of us, remained a kind of terra incognita -- and adds to our knowledge of the time and place, and the people who lived in it, without sentimentality and without evasion. "White people had it hard, and black people had it harder than that," he writes, "because what are the table scraps of nothing?" Yet even this grim economic reality is not allowed to soften Bragg's treatment of the racial reality of his South. "This was two separate states," Bragg writes, "both wanting and desperate, kept separate by hard men who hid their faces under hoods and their deeds under some twisted interpretation of the Bible, and kicked the living shit out of anyone who thought it should be different." </p>
<p>
<span class="dropcap">T</span>he unsparing bottom-up perspective of Bragg's narrative stands in stark contrast to a recent memoir by another liberal white southerner: Jimmy Carter's 2001 <i>An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood</i>. This memoir by the former president and erstwhile peanut farmer from Plains, Ga., is a mostly well-written, meticulously descriptive and emotionally soothing narrative of life on the Carter family farm in the 1920s and 1930s. Carter's father was a relatively prosperous and, apparently, entirely virtuous farmer and landlord who treated the several black tenant families on the Carter property with fairness -- and who instilled a work ethic in his son to rival that of the Yankee Puritans up north. It is somewhat jarring, then, to come across a passage early on in the book that presents a picture of race and class relations that seems not only evasive and self-serving, but also revealing of the southern gentility's age-old class prejudices. </p>
<p>
With an identifiable whiff of nostalgia, Carter describes the economic and social dynamics of the community in which he grew up, assuring us that even under Jim Crow there were redeeming qualities to be found. This is no doubt true, to some extent, but in Carter's telling it becomes problematic, to say the least. "With the racially segregated social system practically unchallenged," he writes, "it seemed that blacks and whites accepted each other as partners in their shared poverty." Carter provides ample evidence of his own "partnership" with the black families on his father's farm -- indeed, a significant portion of Carter's memoir is devoted to the intimate and salutary relationships he developed with the black tenant families, both the children and adults, on his father's property -- but nothing in his book suggests that he or his family ever knew real poverty, so one wonders how he presumes to speak for those who did. Still, Carter presses on, explaining, "Despite the legal and social mandate of racial segregation, the personal relationships among black and white families were quite different from those of today, at least in many aspects of life on our farm, because our daily existence was almost totally intertwined." </p>
<p>
But Carter would not want to leave us with the impression that this racial harmony was always and everywhere unbroken. He admits that there were those unfortunate occasions when the uglier aspects of the social order intruded upon the arcadia of his childhood. And this is where Carter's narrative stops me cold.</p>
<p>
"I recall a few instances when disreputable whites had to appeal to the larger community to confirm their racial superiority by siding with them in a dispute, but their very need to do so confirmed their own low social status," Carter writes. "For those who were lazy or dishonest, or had repulsive personal habits, 'white trash' was a greater insult than any epithet based on race."</p>
<p>
The term "white trash" is indeed an insult and a dehumanizing epithet, and it is hard to believe that an educated man such as Carter could be oblivious to the way his use of the term (quotation marks notwithstanding), and the context in which he uses it, seems to conflate class and morality. As an explanation, or scapegoat, for racism, it lets the "better" and better-off folks off the hook -- as though only "disreputable" lower-class whites ever felt the need to "confirm their racial superiority" -- even as it attaches that familiar moral stigma to the victims of white poverty. In the very next breath, Carter tells us, "In fact, the final judgment of people I knew was based on their own character and achievements, and not on their race." Ah, yes, a meritocracy. What else could explain white poverty but a lack of <i>character</i>? It all so conveniently runs together: laziness, dishonesty, repulsive personal habits, low social status -- and racism. Prosperous men such as Carter's father, on the other hand, were merely hardworking, law-abiding citizens, respectable members of the community who were, regrettably, subject to the prevailing "legal and social mandate of racial segregation." After all, this was rural Georgia in 1935.</p>
<p>
In these lines -- the most surprising, and perhaps the most revealing, in an otherwise circumspect memoir -- Carter comes dangerously close to rendering the South's poor whites as untouchably "other," holding them at arm's length at best. If Carter had gone on to explore the junction of race and class in greater depth, then perhaps this passage, with its tortured syntax, could have been elucidated. But this is Carter's only substantive statement on the subject. Apparently, in Carter's mind, it sufficiently explains the racism he saw in his youth. </p>
<p>
In fact, Carter acknowledges in passing that he knew few, if any, poor whites in his childhood -- which may suggest, if you care to think about it, that poor whites were more alienated from "respectable" white society than were the blacks who lived and worked in such close proximity to Carter's family, and with whom the family's "daily existence was almost totally intertwined." But in Carter's memoir, not only do the South's poor whites remain unknown, the author appears to remain, on some crucial level, unknown to himself.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 16 Sep 2002 18:03:24 +0000142783 at http://prospect.orgWen StephensonTravel: Lonelier Planethttp://prospect.org/article/travel-lonelier-planet
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><span class="dropcap">I</span> was in Bombay on January 17, 1991, sitting in the<br />
Indian Airlines office in the financial district, when I heard the first rumors<br />
of bombs falling on Baghdad. My mission was to make last-minute ticket changes<br />
while my traveling companion, a fellow American, went to Bombay's Victoria<br />
Terminus to book us on that evening's eastbound train to Aurangabad. We had<br />
decided to change our itinerary, which was rather loose to begin with, in order<br />
to do the "tourist thing" and see the famous Hindu caves at Ellora and Ajanta. We<br />
were not quite at the midway point of our half-year trek across Asia.</p>
<p>
Everyone in the ticket-office waiting area--mostly Brits, Americans, and<br />
Australians--was trying to make sense of the spotty reports relayed by those<br />
who'd caught snippets of CNN in a hotel lobby. Somebody said that a major ground<br />
offensive was under way and that a column of U.S. armor was moving toward the<br />
Iraqi capital, which was being heavily bombarded. (Only the bombardment, of<br />
course, proved to be factual.) Looking around, reading the body language of my<br />
fellow Westerners, I felt a visceral shock of recognition: I was 22 years old and<br />
10,000 miles from home, and my country was at war.</p>
<p>
When I arrived at Victoria Terminus, that relic of old British Bombay, to meet<br />
my friend, it was like something out of David Lean. Only the costumes had<br />
changed. I'd been on the subcontinent for two and a half months, yet it was as<br />
though I'd just disembarked--everything was strange, alien, subtly threatening.<br />
There was the sheer mass of humanity in the cavernous space of the station, the<br />
anarchy of sound and movement, the faces of myriad complexions pressing in from<br />
all sides, the eyes that fixed you in their sights, locked on, and then passed<br />
by. How many of them, I wondered, were Muslim?</p>
<p>
My friend and I made visual contact through the crowd. He was standing near<br />
the entrance to the platforms, like a neon sign in the dusk. I walked up to him,<br />
and there we stood, facing each other with our high-tech backpacks and our<br />
state-of-the-art hiking shoes, our money belts around our waists, and our guilty,<br />
pale, anxious faces. </p>
<p>
"The war has started," I said.</p>
<p>
"I know," he replied. And that was all that either of us could think to say<br />
for what seemed a very long time.</p>
<p>
<span class="dropcap">W</span>hat was I doing in Bombay in January 1991? I wasn't an expat; I<br />
wasn't a student; I wasn't in uniform, corporate or military, or working for an<br />
organization; I wasn't out to save the world or anyone's soul (except, perhaps,<br />
my own). No, I was merely one of the many privileged young people born in the<br />
sixties or early seventies (I was born in <i>annus horribilis </i>1968) who,<br />
after completing college--and finding little of interest in the financial centers<br />
and suburban office parks of late-twentieth-century America--acquired the<br />
necessary visas and shots, purchased round-the-world airfare and several<br /><i>Lonely Planet</i> guidebooks, donned backpacks and flannel shirts, and<br />
ventured out into the world, preferably as far "off the beaten path" and as far<br />
from Christendom as possible. A crusade in reverse, we marched forth to lose what<br />
religion we had and be conquered.</p>
<p>
Of course, we were hardly the first cohort of young Americans and<br />
Europeans to travel in non-Western lands. As with sex, drugs, and rock and roll,<br />
the baby boomers had beaten us to Shangri-la, and by 1990 the shops of Kathmandu,<br />
Delhi, and Bangkok were full of the Beats, the Beatles, and such<br />
spiritual-countercultural precursors as Huxley, Isherwood, and Watts. </p>
<p>
And yet one thing, in hindsight, seems clear. We met these places and peoples<br />
at a moment of profound global transition: just after the Berlin Wall fell and<br />
the Tiananmen students were crushed, yet before Yeltsin climbed on his tank,<br />
before Sarajevo exploded into war, before Clinton rode out of Arkansas, before<br />
Rwanda descended into hell, before the Web was more than a twinkle in a hacker's<br />
eye, before Nasdaq became a household word, before chaos erupted on the streets<br />
of Seattle. And before bin Laden brought jihad to America. </p>
<p>
What's more, although we knew we weren't the first generation of expensively<br />
educated Westerners to follow an urge and a vogue eastward, we sensed that we<br />
were the first to do so in such numbers--and the first to take global travel for<br />
granted. This may help to explain why some of us (myself included) were so<br />
painfully self-conscious, aware of our status as uninvited guests, acutely<br />
sensitive under the gaze of the anonymous non-Western other. Wherever we went, by<br />
the early 1990s the West and its popular culture--our popular culture--were fast<br />
encroaching upon traditional local cultures. Granted, in the antiglobalization<br />
era, this is hardly news. But it was news to us then. We were among the first<br />
young Westerners to witness this phenomenon, on the ground, as it accelerated<br />
around the world, sweeping into places like Nepal and India and Southeast<br />
Asia--even the remotest corners of China. One of the things we invariably heard<br />
from the older travelers or expats we met in Asia was that we should have seen<br />
Kathmandu, or Varanasi, or the beaches of southern Thailand, before "the<br />
tourists" arrived. </p>
<p>
Everywhere we went, in other words, we saw ourselves reflected back at<br />
us--which, of course, destroyed the "purity" and "authenticity" of whatever it<br />
was we had sought in the first place. (As if these places were ever pure to begin<br />
with--or as if we knew what they were supposed to be pure of.) This gave rise to<br />
a particular form of self-loathing--and a particular feeling toward the society<br />
and culture from which we came--that I suspect is related to the current<br />
antiglobalization movement and, indeed, to the ambivalence of some on the left<br />
toward the latest East-West war.</p>
<p>
<span class="dropcap">J</span>ust before I left for Asia in the fall of 1990, I came upon a<br />
book by Paul Fussell titled <i>Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars,</i><br />
which had been published a decade earlier. Fussell can be an incisive cultural<br />
critic, and what he had to say about the postmodern condition of travel--or, more<br />
properly, tourism--as contrasted with travel in earlier eras, was devastating to<br />
the pretensions of a twenty-something globetrotting imperialist. </p>
<p>
"Before tourism there was travel," Fussell wrote, "and before travel there<br />
was exploration... . I am assuming that travel is now impossible and that tourism<br />
is all we have left." This sad state of affairs, in Fussell's formulation, gives<br />
rise to a peculiar modern type--the "anti-tourist"--who suffers from a "uniquely<br />
modern form of self-contempt." As Fussell explained, </p>
<blockquote><p>It is hard to be a snob and a tourist at the same time. A way<br />
to combine both roles is to become an anti-tourist. Despite the suffering he<br />
undergoes, the anti-tourist is not to be confused with the traveler: his motive<br />
is not inquiry but self-protection and vanity. . . . The anti-tourist's persuasion<br />
that he is really a traveler instead of a tourist is both a symptom and a cause<br />
of what the British journalist Alan Brien has designated <i>tourist angst,</i><br />
defined as "a gnawing suspicion that after all . . . you are still a tourist like<br />
every other tourist." . . . But the anti-tourist deludes only himself. We are all<br />
tourists now, and there is no escape.</p></blockquote>
<p>
Unlike Fussell's literary travelers of the 1920s and 1930s--Graham Greene,<br />
D.H. Lawrence, Christopher Isherwood, and W.H. Auden, to name a few--who didn't<br />
have a global tourist industry, much less a global culture industry, to define<br />
themselves against, the Gen X backpackers of the nineties were a generation of<br />
anti-tourists. Our motive, the serious among us told ourselves, was inquiry--into<br />
cultures, religions, and philosophies we'd read about in college courses. Our<br />
method was the open-ended, low-budget itinerary. Our modus operandi was the<br />
studied indifference to Western, neocolonial expectations of comfort, cuisine,<br />
sanitation, and the conventional acquisition of cultural artifacts (otherwise<br />
known as souvenirs), even photographs. We were the touristic equivalent of the<br />
"independent" and "alternative" in nineties pop culture, clinging to a<br />
collective, commercially packaged, angst-ridden cliché.</p>
<p>
And if our mode of inquiry made us connoisseurs of Thai stick smoked in<br />
$1-a-day bamboo bungalows ($2 a day for beachfront), or of strippers dancing to<br />
Western pop in Hong Kong yuppie nightclubs, it came with the territory. One was<br />
drawn to the East not just by some intellectual curiosity or wanderlust but by<br />
the promise of pleasure and intoxication, both sensual and spiritual. </p>
<p>
"Neither puritanism nor sensuality was ever unique to East or West," Ian<br />
Buruma points out in his essay collection <i>The Missionary and the Libertine,</i> "yet,<br />
on the whole, it is for the latter that Westerners have looked East." Yet the<br />
relationship between East and West, Buruma reminds us, is never one-dimensional;<br />
it has always been characterized by a mutual attraction and repulsion, seduction<br />
and destruction. For Buruma's generation, the Vietnam War was the complicating<br />
prism through which their visions of the East had to pass. He writes:</p>
<blockquote><p>"Saigon . . . shit," the first two words of Francis Ford<br />
Coppola's <i>Apocalypse Now,</i> summed up the ancient view of the East as a<br />
wicked swamp of iniquity, waiting to suck Westerners into its rotting depths.<br />
Saigon was glamorous and corrupt, destroyed by the white man, and destroyer of<br />
white men. It might have been shit, but it was seductive shit.</p></blockquote>
<p>
For those of us who met the East in the early nineties, Vietnam had long since<br />
gone Hollywood. I'll never forget watching Oliver Stone's <i>Platoon</i> during my<br />
freshman year with a troop of my dorm mates. We stumbled out of the theater,<br />
speechless, unable to assimilate the idea that 18- and 19-year-olds just two<br />
decades removed from us could have been subjected to that kind of shit--nothing<br />
seductive about it. Yet for us, it was only a movie. The experience of Vietnam<br />
was utterly alien to us, inassimilable--the past as past, and as spectacle. When<br />
we approached Asia, it was another East, a less dangerous East, a less conflicted<br />
East. Politically, morally, far less was at stake--for us, at least. Or so it<br />
seemed until that day in January 1991. </p>
<p>
<span class="dropcap">E</span>ven then, for some I encountered along the way, there appeared<br />
to be little at stake at all. In late March 1991, I spent several days in the<br />
ancient Bai village of Dali, at the foot of the Cang Shan Mountains in Yunnan,<br />
China's far southwestern province. With its picturesque location, its bus<br />
station, and its prominent write-up in the latest edition of the <i>Lonely<br />
Planet</i> guide to China, Dali was another remote Asian town turned backpackers'<br />
haven. The central hangout in Dali was Jim's Peace Café, where enlightened<br />
Westerners could eat muesli with yogurt and fruit for breakfast and linger for<br />
hours inhaling precious American tobacco smoke (Marlboro being a valuable<br />
currency and an ostentatious status symbol among the Chinese). The small, dimly<br />
lit "café" offered six tables and walls covered with maps, postcards, and<br />
stickers from all over Europe, America, and Australia. Jim was a young guy,<br />
Chinese, doing his best to cater to Western tastes. In addition to the muesli and<br />
yogurt, there were several types of pizza on the menu, along with the requisite<br />
french-fried potatoes. </p>
<p>
Jim's was (and may still be, for all I know) a crossroads of what I came to<br />
think of as the Muesli Trail--and the epitome of the <i>Lonely Planet</i> generation's<br />
contradictions. It wasn't McDonald's; it was the anti-McDonald's, the flip side,<br />
and every bit as much the symbol of Western encroachment, ignorance, and<br />
arrogance. And yet, there was the English-speaking Jim (whose urban educated<br />
parents were exiled to Dali for "re-education" during the Cultural Revolution),<br />
who wouldn't have traded his commerce with the outside world, economic and<br />
cultural, for anything. Meanwhile, the people of Dali graciously accepted our<br />
presence, going about their lives with only the occasional furtive glance over<br />
their shoulders at the approaching juggernaut of history. What choice did they<br />
have?</p>
<p>
January 17, 1991, had all the trappings of a defining moment. There in<br />
that Bombay train station, I assumed that Americans my age were going to learn<br />
something of war (whether or not we served in uniform--and I was acutely aware<br />
that I did not), and that this knowledge would shape us as it had shaped all<br />
wartime generations. But then, almost as quickly as it had materialized, this<br />
feeling vanished. The Gulf War, and the recession that followed, now seemed an<br />
aberration in an otherwise happy progress toward a borderless, frictionless<br />
world. For many of us, the defining moment would come four years later, when<br />
Netscape went public. </p>
<p>
But for me, at least, the Gulf War was also the beginning of the end of my<br />
budding romance with the East. My hopes of bridging cultures and collapsing<br />
distances, my easy, unearned faith in the ability of experience and knowledge<br />
alone--my experience and knowledge, freshly acquired--to transcend difference,<br />
were dashed against the grim reality of "us" and "them." It was no longer<br />
possible to pretend that such categories were meaningless. "We" were America and<br />
the West, with all the benefits and baggage that that entailed. "They," for<br />
better and worse, were not.</p>
<p>
On September 11, 2001, as I witnessed the events on CNN, I felt a sickening<br />
sense, a dawning realization, of some deeply rooted connection between my memory<br />
of that day in Bombay when the bombs started falling and the scenes in Manhattan<br />
and at the Pentagon. What started in January 1991 had never ended. My<br />
generation's war, if that's what this was, had merely been on a 10-year hiatus.</p>
<p>
September 11 has already come to mean many things to many people. One thing it<br />
confirmed for me is that the gaze we felt upon us once, in those Eastern<br />
longitudes, has only intensified--has, in many places, turned from curiosity to<br />
fear and from fear to menace. To face this honestly means confronting the part we<br />
played in the unfolding drama and abandoning whatever comforts and conceits we<br />
may have assumed from our cosmopolitan vantage point between worlds. Far from<br />
innocent, no matter how sincerely curious we may have been, the fact is that we<br />
were globalization's vanguard, its shock troops, its goateed expeditionary force.</p>
<p>
Fussell was right. We are all tourists. No amount of curiosity or<br />
self-consciousness, no postured self-doubt, can mitigate our complicity in the<br />
tragedy of our time: the failure of communication and understanding across the<br />
East-West divide. "Only connect," said another, earlier tourist, E.M. Forster.<br />
If only it were so easy.</p>
<p> </p></div></div></div>Thu, 24 Jan 2002 19:23:14 +0000142433 at http://prospect.orgWen StephensonMrs. Vendler's Professionhttp://prospect.org/article/mrs-vendlers-profession
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</p><p> <span class="dropcap">P</span>oor, old Robert Frost--destined to be knocked around as a political tennis ball ever since that day in December 1960 when John F. Kennedy called him at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and asked if he would read a poem at the upcoming inauguration. According to Frost biographer Jay Parini, Kennedy first suggested that Frost compose something new for the occasion, but the poet demurred. So Kennedy, who was well acquainted with Frost's poetry, fell back on Plan B and suggested that the 86-year-old national icon read his poem "The Gift Outright" (first published in 1942, in <i>A Witness Tree</i>), the 16 lines of which go like this:<br /></p><p><br /></p><blockquote><p>The land was ours before we were the land's.<br /><br />She was our land more than a hundred years<br /><br />Before we were her people. She was ours<br /><br />In Massachusetts, in Virginia,<br /><br />But we were England's, still colonials,<br /><br />Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,<br /><br />Possessed by what we now no more possessed.<br /><br />Something we were withholding made us weak<br /><br />Until we found out that it was ourselves<br /><br />We were withholding from our land of living,<br /><br />And forthwith found salvation in surrender.<br /><br />Such as we were we gave ourselves outright<br /><br />(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)<br /><br />To the land vaguely realizing westward,<br /><br />But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,<br /><br />Such as she was, such as she would become.</p></blockquote>
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</p><p> Kennedy had just one small request: Would it be possible, in the last line, to change "as she would become" to "as she <i>will</i> become," just to make it sound more optimistic? Frost responded hesitantly, Parini tells us. "I suppose so."<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Frost did, at the last minute, end up writing something new for the occasion--77 lines of pseudo-Augustan couplets intended to preface his reading of the older poem--but not many people remember it (even though it was published in his final volume, <i>In the Clearing,</i> in 1962), and that's just as well, because the poem is embarrassing both for its views and its versification (the last couplet: "A golden age of poetry and power / Of which this noonday's the beginning hour"). What people do remember is an aged poet with a shock of white hair struggling to read the faint typescript of his new poem in the wind and glare of a bright January morning and rather quickly giving up, only to launch into a flawless recitation of "The Gift Outright." "He ended magnificently," Parini reports, "dragging out the last line: 'Such as she was, such as she <i>would</i> become, <i>has</i> become, and I--and for this occasion let me change that to--what she <i>will</i> become." Quite a performance. Poetry and politics, you might say, in perfect sync.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>But what of the poem? Many have taken issue with its high rhetorical whitewashing of the continent's conquest, the nationalism of its exclusive We. "This was the calm reassurance of American destiny that provoked Tonto's response to the Lone Ranger," Derek Walcott, the Nobel Prizewinning poet, remarked in a 1995 essay on Frost. "No slavery, no colonization of Native Americans, a process of dispossession and then possession, but nothing about the dispossession of others that this destiny demanded." But Walcott (who, as a native of St. Lucia, knows a thing or two about colonialism) is not one to let politics obscure a poet's true artistic achievement. He goes on in the same essay to celebrate Frost's originality and force, concluding: "There is nothing to forgive Frost's poetry for. There are, instead, many poems to be grateful for, so many poems, indeed, that the man, the biography, the symbol of Yankee resilience are all negligible, since poetry pronounces benediction not on the poet but on the reader."<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>The British poet, journalist, and reader James Fenton--whose most recent collection of poems, <i>Out of Danger</i> (1994), won the prestigious Whitbread Prize--isn't so charitable. In <i>The Strength of Poetry,</i> his newly published volume of lectures delivered as Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1994 to 1999, Fenton labels "The Gift Outright" a "modern imperialist poem." "It is typical of the imperial point of view that it is ignorant of, or blind to, the other," he writes, and then lets fly this volley:<br /></p><p><br /></p><blockquote><p>Yes, there had to be deeds of war--"The deed of gift was many deeds of war"--but why or against whom we need not, on this occasion, consider. The point is rather to wallow in the metaphysics of the conceit that Americans, in order to become truly American and truly strong, had to yield to the land, surrender to it, instead of what you would expect from an account of a pioneering society--that they had to seize the land and bend it to their will. </p></blockquote>
<p> Fenton's treatment of "The Gift Outright"--which, Fenton not being one to mince words, he goes on to disparage as "egregious rubbish"--is the most strident moment in a book covering such twentieth-century poets as Wilfred Owen, Philip Larkin, T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and W.H. Auden. Yet as damning and unnuanced as this reading may be (there is none of Walcott's insight into Frost's poetic innovation, no acknowledgment of Frost's undeniable contribution to the development of modern poetry), such a politically charged response to "The Gift Outright" is justified on some level, especially when one recalls the image of Robert Frost reading at John F. Kennedy's inauguration--a moment embedded, for better or worse, in public memory.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>
</p><p> Nevertheless, in a scathing prepublication review of Fenton's book for <i>The New Republic</i> in late March, Helen Vendler, the Harvard English professor and ubiquitous poetry critic--considered by many the most influential critic of contemporary poetry in the United States today--seized upon Fenton's treatment of "The Gift Outright." Here is a prime example of wrongheaded political criticism, she instructs, and then goes on to offer her own corrective reading of the poem. (Though not before pausing to rebuke Fenton for what she takes as a telling error. "Fenton's animus cannot even stop to check its facts," she writes, before proceeding to quote Fenton's claim that "The Gift Outright" was written, in Fenton's words, "for purposes of state--in this case the inauguration of John F. Kennedy." The only problem is that Vendler's animus toward Fenton apparently cannot pause long enough to check its own facts: The finished version of Fenton's book contains no mention of the Kennedy inauguration at all; the passage she quotes is from the uncorrected proofs.)<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>
</p><p> Fact checking and personal animus aside, what Vendler goes on to say about Fenton's book as whole, is interesting for what it reveals about Vendler as a critic and about the kind of influence she wields with such a heavy hand--an influence that would attempt to prescribe the proper role of the critic and the proper boundaries of criticism itself.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>"Fenton wants Frost to have written the materialist poem of manifest destiny," Vendler tells us. "But Frost is after other game: when, he asks, and how, and why, does any émigré begin to feel patriotic about the land he now inhabits instead of about the land he has left? How does such a change in consciousness take place?" In other words, Vendler <i>doesn't</i> want Frost to have written an overtly public-themed poem dealing with an objective, historical reality but a poem about a private, inner phenomenon. "Why is it that Fenton has so mistaken a poem about the inner process of a transfer of loyalty?" she asks. "Because his politics has wrenched him into misreading it."<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Vendler's account of the poem, with her close attention to the language, is characteristically assured, but not particularly convincing. To call "The Gift Outright" a poem about "the inner process of a transfer of loyalty" is one thing; but to say, as she does, that "analogically taken, it is as much a poem about marriage as about colonials becoming Americans" is, well, a bit of a stretch--and seems willfully blind to the poem's explicit subject matter, simply for the sake of polemic. I'm all for reading "analogically," but what need is there to read a poem like "The Gift Outright" in such a way? Is that how the audience of the Kennedy inauguration heard it? Or any general reader before or since? (Good luck convincing Jack Kennedy that the poem he requested for his inauguration could just as easily be about marriage and the "inner process" of becoming a faithful spouse.)<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>What is it about Fenton that so offends Vendler's sensibilities as a critic? "It is revealing," she writes in the closing paragraphs of her review, "to notice how rarely Fenton ends his lectures on a literary note, claiming a new literary originality of some sort for his writers." The term "literary" can be taken many ways, but one assumes here that Vendler means the kind of close reading for which she herself is known, as opposed to the historical or biographical. Indeed, she concludes: "One would like to see Fenton writing a series of lectures on works denuded of biographical context--to see him write as a poet on poetry. On the strength of poetry. To live up, in short, to his title."<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Fenton's real sin, in short, is that as a critic he is so utterly unlike Helen Vendler. In fact, it's hard to think of two contemporary critics who lie at further extremes of the spectrum of emphasis, style, and method. Fenton--who spent much of his career as a foreign correspondent in East Asia for <i>The Independent</i> (he was among the last Western journalists to leave Saigon in 1975) and has been a critic for the <i>New Statesman</i> and <i>The Times</i> of London--is obsessed with biography, politics, and sexual and cultural identity. His style tends toward the conversational, the anecdotal, and the irreverent. His arguments are loosely structured (when they are structured at all), painted in the broadest strokes.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Vendler may lack Fenton's colorful curriculum vitae, but what she lacks in worldliness she more than makes up for in scholarly authority. A distinguished lifelong academic, her work on the odes of Keats and on the sonnets of Shakespeare has been widely acclaimed, and her frequent reviews for <i>The New Yorker, The New Republic,</i> and <i>The New York Review of Books</i> (to which Fenton is also a regular contributor) are often widely discussed. As a critic, Vendler's obsessions are the aesthetic, the lyric, and the most subliminal elements of poetic technique. Her style is relentlessly serious and scholarly. Her tightly structured arguments are based almost entirely on close textual analysis, the sole purpose of which is to pass (sometimes austere) aesthetic judgment. Vendler's representative poet might well be James Merrill, whom she described in a recent <i>New Yorker</i> review of his <i>Collected Poems</i> as "minutely interested in the tiniest elements of language" and praised for having persevered through "accusations of snobbery, affectation, preciousness, artifice, perversity, and élitism." If one poet among Fenton's favorites can be taken to represent his proclivities, it would perhaps be Auden, his illustrious predecessor as Oxford Professor of Poetry, to whom Fenton devotes no fewer than three of his lectures.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Maybe the difference between Fenton and Vendler, and between the opposing approaches to criticism they represent, comes down to this old, perhaps irresolvable debate: Is poetry, including Vendler's privileged lyric genre, a public affair, open and available to all readers and responses, and therefore part of the public life and political discourse of its time and place, an artifact of public record and public memory--of history? Or does a poem exist in a separate, aesthetic realm of the poet's imagination, a private world to which only the most educated, alert, and sophisticated readers can gain admittance? And in either case or both, what responsibility, if any, does the poet--to say nothing of the critic--owe the world, the public realm? For Vendler, lyric poetry is an "essentially private genre," and the moment a critic ventures into politics he crosses a dangerous frontier into the uncivilized terrain of journalism (that profession of ill repute). Fenton knows that the critic is already a journalist; for him, a poem, its context, its author's biography, are always fair political game: They have to be, because for Fenton there are no neat divisions between politics and art, between art and life.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>
</p><p> One of the lectures Fenton does end on a "literary note" is the one on Seamus Heaney, the Catholic-born Nobel laureate from Northern Ireland, who was Fenton's immediate predecessor at Oxford and is a poet Fenton clearly admires--enough so to defend him against attacks by politically motivated critics. (Caught between nationalism and nonviolence, it must feel to Heaney as though he's been attacked from all sides: by those who would have had him take a stronger stand for the Irish Republican cause and by those who have maliciously read into certain of his poems a moral or political stance, including implicit support for IRA violence, that he does not espouse.)<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>
</p><p> Vendler doesn't comment on Fenton's Heaney lecture in her <i>New Republic</i> review, which is somewhat odd given that her most recent book--titled, simply, <i>Seamus Heaney</i> and published in 1998--is an unabashed celebration of Heaney's career up to 1996. Responding, like Fenton, to Heaney's political critics, Vendler issues some of her strongest statements about the nature of lyric poetry and how it ought (and ought not) to be read:<br /></p><p></p>
<blockquote><p>Heaney's adversary critics read the poems as statements of a political position, with which they quarrel. To read lyric poems as if they were expository essays is a fundamental philosophical mistake... .</p></blockquote>
<p></p><p><br /></p><p>Lyric is not narrative or drama; it is not primarily concerned to relate events, or to reify contesting issues. Rather, its act is to present, adequately and truthfully, through the means of temporally prolonged symbolic form, the private mind and heart caught in the changing events of a geographical place and a historical epoch.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>
</p><p> These comments from the book's introduction strike me as an effort to close off debate with a few statements of inarguable critical dogma. <i>Obviously</i> a lyric poem is not an expository essay. <i>Obviously</i> lyric is not narrative or drama. Who could disagree? But this does not mean that a poem, even a lyric poem, never takes a position or expresses a political idea that demands an answer. After all, it was none other than Frost who wrote, in his famous essay "The Figure a Poem Makes," that in the end even poetry boils down to "one more art of having something to say."<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Whereas a critic like Fenton takes it for granted that a poem is an inherently public act of communication, Vendler wants to remove poetry, and lyric in particular, from the public realm of political discourse. This puts her in an awkward position with regard to Heaney, a poet who knows well enough (as evidenced by his own essays and lectures in his books <i>The Government of the Tongue</i> and <i>The Redress of Poetry)</i> that his lyrics live in the open, that each connection between poet and reader takes place in the public space of the page. Vendler seems to want nothing less than to rescue Heaney from his inescapable role as a public poet, to keep him private (to keep him to herself). Yet nothing can change the fact that Heaney's poems, even those that appear the furthest removed from politics, are not private correspondence or entries in a diary but public utterances.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>This tension between the public and private lives of poetry is perfectly displayed in the concluding passage of <i>Seamus Heaney,</i> where Vendler concedes, almost apologetically, that "Heaney has been forced, by the place and time into which he was born, to take on, within the essentially private genre to which he was called, the representation of an unignorable social dimension." But she cannot possibly leave it at that. She must remind her reader that<br /></p><p><br /></p><blockquote><p>the only thing to which the genre of lyric obliges its poet is to represent his own situation and his responses to it in adequate imaginative language... . [The demand of Heaney's critics] that he see predicaments of politics or gender as they would, or have the same feelings about them as they do is, of course, unanswerable; that is not a demand one can make of art.</p></blockquote>
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</p><p> Fair enough. But one feels compelled to ask: What demands are we permitted to make of criticism? Certain demands may truly be "unanswerable" in the terms of art alone, but surely criticism is answerable; that is, as a form of journalism, like it or not, it must answer to the demands of history and politics. In <i>Seamus Heaney,</i> Vendler answers this demand in spite of herself: Despite her disavowals, she manages to deepen our understanding of Heaney's achievement as a witness to the political and moral predicaments of his time and place. For that, we have to be grateful. In the end, however, one would like to see Vendler acknowledge the full compass of her role as critic--to see her own up to the inherently public and, yes, political nature of her work, as Heaney acknowledges the nature of his. To live up, in short, to her title.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 05 Nov 2001 22:55:36 +0000142100 at http://prospect.orgWen Stephenson